310. Sex Scene Choreography and W. H. Auden.

What a happy coincidence.  The New York Review that has Auden objecting to nakedness on stage (10-22-15) is on the coffee table at the same time as the New Yorker carrying an interview with a fellow who choreographs sex scenes on the New York stage (10-12-15).

You can go from advice to an actor on where to put his penis during simulated intercourse (so it won't get crushed) to one of the nicest arguments for privacy and public decorum you're likely to hear.

Auden is spare, as usual, and you have to supply the rest of the argument he suggests.  He, thinking about the people "doing all those things" (in 1969), wonders if they "can have any real friends."  To him friendship depends, apparently, on observing "an essential difference between the public and the private life."  If you are really friends (or, lovers), "You take off your clothes in private; sex is a private matter."

To the choreographer, Yehuda Duenyas, disrobing "is all about getting past cultural inhibitions, the elimination of shame.  'You have a body and your body is beautiful.'"  In the nude rehearsals he gets naked right in there with the actors.

Their arguments don't exactly meet.  Auden, who might believe equally in the beauty of the body, is against displaying its sexual encounters in public.  Duenyas defends that display with his easily believed statement about the body's beauty.  Easily believed, but on the Auden side easily seen as irrelevant — and, by some I'm sure, as the common sign of uncertainty and weakness on the part of a cultural ground-breaker.

Knowing Auden for the poet he is, and knowing now of his strong physical attachments (he was a closeted gay), we can hear him telling us, in his insistence that friendship and love are a private matter, that yes, of course, that's where the excitement is, in partner knowledge, personality knowledge.  Without that knowledge you don't have friends, you have bodies.  Much less exciting.

And Auden, again like a good poet, stimulates you to go on.  Past those people doing and displaying "all those things."  How about those people watching?  What do they have?